Posts Tagged ‘david-speyrer’

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The handsome fellows at PC Gamer have posted my interview with David Speyrer – project lead on Half-Life 2: Episode Two – up on their website. You may remember a few weeks back we posted the bits that were left over. Well, here’s the cream of the interview for your eye-based enjoyment.

Illustrative excerpt:

That seems like quite an achievement. Companions tend to be infuriating. How did you avoid this with Alyx?

Speyrer: Alyx doesn’t generally dictate the pace of your forward progress through the game. When she does that, it feels like she’s playing the game and you’re the tag-along. We learned this in Episode One, and applied it in Ep Two as well. The player should dictate the pace of moving through the game.

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Coming up in December’s PC Gamer is my interview with Half-Life 2 Episode 2’s project lead, David Speyrer. And as is often the case with interviews, there was a lot more said than could fit in the magazine. As a teaser for next month’s Gamer content, here’s some bonus discussion about what it’s like working for Valve, how play-testing impacts on the games development, DX9 vs DX10, and the role of consoles. Spoilers a-go-go.

RPS: Could you talk about your role in the Half-Life universe?

David Speyrer: I interviewed on the day that HL1 went Gold, and started early in the year in ’99, at the very beginning of HL2. I was on the project for the whole duration. Towards the middle of the project, we formed into four cabals – mini design teams – for design and production, and each team was responsible for building a section of the game. I ended up as the cabal leader of the team which made Canals and the Citadel. I was a programmer. I worked on the air-boat, the poisoned zombie and a bunch of other things. Then on Episode Two I’ve been on it from the start as the project lead and programmer. I did specific work on the Hunter AI and some of the car stuff.